From the cam technology that had been used in music boxes and cuckoo clocks, inventors Thomas Blanchard and Christopher Miner Spencer developed lathes. The machine tool industry of the 1800′s did not use the work of Jacquard Loom and Charles Babbage in abstractly programming controls in mechanical computers.
Automation was industrialized with the development of tools that could copy templates using a stylus through the use of hydraulics like the Pratt and Whitney “Keller Machine”. In the 1950′s General Motors used a method to capture the manual movements of a machinist and re-play those movements on command.
The problem with developing a computerized numerical control machine was in the degree of reliability in the reading by the machine of the abstract code. The invention of the Servo, which gave right measurement information, solved that problem.
When one servo’s performance was repeated by a remote servo a Selsyn was made. The products of a Selsyn could be read by various mechanical and electrical systems to ensure that the right information had been transferred.
A Swedish immigrant employed by General Electric, Ernst F.W. Alexanderson, suggested that Selsyn’s could be used for machining control. General Electric used Alexanderson’s use of a mechanical computer that amplified torque letting big machines to be run by little force, in their gun laying system for United States Navy ships.
However, the efforts of trying to make a helicopter propeller by John T. Parsons in 1942 credited him as the father of the numerical control machine. In an effort to get MIT suggestions on his punch card input machine, Parsons turned to MIT who took his invention and left him out of production, greatly surprising Parsons..
Using computer control, punch tapes made on the Whirlwind were made by John Runyon. A uniform “programming” language for numerical control introducing computerized numerical control was proposed in June 1956, by the Air Force.
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